There is no doubt that the ideas goals missions and.docx

1、There is no doubt that the ideas goals missions andAmusing the MillionsHigher Education and the Culture of DistractionsKatherine L. PfeifferFord Forum PaperProfessor JohnstonApril 21, 2009 Pfeiffer 2 There is no doubt that the ideas, goals, missions and techniques of higher education are both wide a

2、nd varied. However, all institutions of higher learning certainly have one very rudimentary premise in common, and that is for students to learn. Here arise several difficulties. What are students going to learn in their undergraduate studies? Should they be persuaded to take a sampling of courses f

3、rom different disciplines, or should they focus on their chosen major? Should they be taught the classics or should the scope of their education be limited to more modern material? Should professors stick to strictly academic teaching, or are citizenship and morality important parts of undergraduate

4、 education? How should students be taught, in a lecture hall, laboratory or seminar circle? Perhaps the most important question we need to be asking is: are students learning at all? The answer to that question is both complicated and disconcerting. As the world has become more globalized, technolog

5、ically advanced, materialistically driven, and unprecedentedly populated answering that question requires the recognition of several new dimensions and paradigms that have affected learning in the 21st century, apparently in a negative way. According to Lion Gardiner, a professor of zoology at Rutge

6、rs University, “A very few studies report exceptionally high values, such as students retaining 50% of the course content, studies more commonly report a retention of 20% or less.” Results from the same study also indicate that many students have a difficult time answering basic questions within the

7、ir own field of study and answer them correctly only 6% more often than students in other fields. So what is the problem? Why, after four years of studying, do so many students seem to have not learned much of anything?Pfeiffer 3 There is much evidence that indicates this lack of processing has more

8、 to do with our culture than anything else. The central idea behind this theory is that our cultural environment provides an inordinate amount of mental stimulation to the extent that we expend more cognitive energy weeding out the information that we do not need than we do actually processing anyth

9、ing. A huge part of this problem is rooted in American consumerism and materialism. Advertisements represent a significant percentage of this information overload: “everyday, an estimated 12 billion display ads, 3 million radio commercials, and more than 200,000 TV commercials are dumped into North

10、Americas collective unconscious.” Essentially, there is just too much going on. Although, we have yet to see generational effects of constant marketing, we can be sure that our minds have been affected. In fact, there is a set of terminology to describe the abuses that have destroyed our attention s

11、pans, it includes noise, jolts (defined by Lasn as a technical event that interrupts the flow of sound or thought or imagery), shock, hype and unreality. All of these things add to the din of our cultural background and make it a little bit more difficult to pay attention and learn. There are so man

12、y distractions in our environment that it is nearly impossible to focus. The age of information and technology is certainly having a huge impact on higher education, and some of it is definitely positive and very progressive in terms of learning. Computers enable us to learn and respond more than ev

13、er before with high speed internet connections and global databases. Students today can research more and research faster, or they can peruse Facebook, where they meet more advertisements and distractions. As a nation and as a global force we have created and assimilated so many diversions that Pfei

14、ffer 4knowledge has been replaced with entertainment. Consumerism and globalization have both increased because of technological advances made in the past few decades so it becomes no wonder that our minds are elsewhere. Kalle Lasn, creator of Adbusters magazine, author of Culture Jam and advocator

15、of media literacy sums up the interaction this way, In the last quarter century the insatiable craving for the consumer cultures big, big show has only grown stronger. To meet the demand, media spectacles have colonized our mental environment, crowding out history and context. In their place there i

16、s now only a flood of disconnected information: The market is soaring, the planet is warming, this falls hemlines are knee high, theres a famine in East Africa. There is another dimension to this excess of information that we must consider in the context of higher education, and that is the overwhel

17、ming number of choices we have. Dystopian literature always portrays a world where there are almost no choices to be made and this results in happy citizens. The reader, especially the western reader, refuses to believe in such a mindless happiness and will doubtlessly relate to the protagonist of t

18、he work who dares to think outside the box. Of course, this genre takes the truth about choice and happiness to the extreme. From the research it appears that there is some quantitative relationship between choice and contentment. Barry Schwartz, social scientist and author of The Paradox of Choice,

19、 explains that our modern world provides us with an excess of choice that for many individuals becomes distressing. This relates back to the idea of everythings being Pfeiffer 5bigger and better in America. Consumerism pressures us to make the right choice while at the same time setting the stage fo

20、r us to regret our decisions for fear of falling short of our potential. Everything in our society has become marketable and we have learned to shop for everything, even our education. Schwartz tells us, “these days, a typical college catalog has more in common with the one from J.Crew than you migh

21、t think. Most liberal arts colleges and universities now embody a view that celebrates freedom of choice above all else, and the modern university is a kind of intellectual shopping mall.” While an abundance of educational opportunities is not necessarily detrimental to higher education, there are s

22、ome fundamental drawbacks to having such a broad range of choices, and how selections are made. “Shopping” for classes has become a popular practice in some universities and this interpretation of course selection reflects our larger practice of always looking for something better. Schwartz describe

23、s this unconventional method of scheduling as an experience quite like any other shopping trip, “In the first few weeks of class, students sample the merchandise. They go to a class, stay ten minutes to see what the professor is like, then walk out, often in the middle of the professors sentence, to

24、 try another class.” Our consumer binge has permeated even our education system. Students can make decisions about their education the same way they pick out a new outfit at the mall. Unfortunately, a poorly chosen curriculum, or one selected for the wrong reasons, can have a worse effect on a stude

25、nts future than a fashion faux pas. According to Hagedorn Pfeiffer 6and Maxwell, “occasional course shopping was not associated with lower academic performance, but frequent cyclic shoppers were less likely to have strong grade point averages and a successful rate of course completions.” As a cultur

26、e, we spend so much time sorting through information and making choices that our everyday lives, particularly as students, have become almost mind-numbing tasks. Technological advances have also led to another phenomenon that we experience daily, the constant hum of our electronics. The refrigerator

27、, the computer, rush hour traffic, air conditioning, cell phones, music, and of course TV all have added to the distracting background noise of western society more than we realize as we collectively struggle to tune it out. When we expend so much energy trying to concentrate in this noisy existence

28、, we operate at a reduced level of brain power, “trying to make sense of the world above the din of our wired world is like living next to a freeway you get used to it, but at a much diminished level of mindfulness and well being.” Needless to say, for students listening to a lecture in a classroom

29、that is buzzing with heating or cooling systems and vibrating cell phones, with the conditioned attention span of a goldfish, it can be very difficult to learn anything significant. Essentially what we are left with is a society that is not conductive to absorbing material of an intellectual nature.

30、 Now that we recognize there is a learning issue in higher education settings in the context of western culture, and particularly American culture, what can we do to reverse the low retention trends? And how do we make technology work toward higher education goals? John C. Scott, a scholar who has d

31、one research on the mission statement of modern educational institutions believes, “high Pfeiffer 7technology and rapid globalization are altering work, leisure time, and formal schooling structures. At the heart of this new information society, academic institutions are pivotal organizations. Yet t

32、hey must remain flexible enough to respond to emerging social demands, technological change and economic realignments.” Indeed, universities have always had to respond to and evolve with changes in greater civilization. In our postmodern age, it seems that everything about what and how students are

33、learning must be reevaluated. Since educated citizens are such a vital part of a nations growth, we must take care to see that they are actually “college educated” by the end of their time at college or university. The first part of this reevaluation process concerns the mission statement of the American uni